Burning Man announces 2019 theme: Metamorphoses

In the midst of its own transformation, Burning Man has chosen its 2019 theme in “metamorphoses.” Inspired by its very tendency to change peoples’ lives, Burning Man will center its annual Nevada desert gathering around ideas of change, transformation, uncertainty, evolution, and revolution.

“This year’s theme is a celebration of change, and an exploration of uncertainty. As such it invites a consideration of time; not its circular nature, or its attendant ritual, but in this case the relentless flight of time’s arrow, and an embrace of the elusive now,” wrote Darryl Van Rhey, a Bay Area writer, in the Burning Man Journal.

Burning Man is routinely described as transformative. A transformative experience, at the personal level, and a transformative event at the group or cultural level.

One of Burning Man’s founders, the late Lee Harvey, is quoted in the announcement: “That’s why [Burning Man] has spread so contagiously, and caused people to take it back with them, and apply it to ordinary life: because it has engineered a change in who they really are.”